Atomic inertial sensors (e.g., cold atom accelerometers and gyroscopes) have potential to provide very accurate, high resolution sensing, however, they have limitations imposed by sampled, destructive readout of accumulated motion over short time periods in their normal mode of operation involving cooling and measurement cycles of constrained and divided Bose-Einstein condensate or other suitably prepared groups of atoms. This is not typically a constraint for use in gravimetric or very low g applications with very limited bandwidth and range, but restricts their usefulness in ballistic and aircraft navigation applications due to low bandwidth and gaps between samples while atom cooling is performed.
Conventional inertial sensors, such as a vibratory structure gyroscope, a fiber optic gyroscope, or a resonating beam accelerometer, can operate at a higher bandwidth, but are subject to bias, scale factor, or other errors that can vary significantly over time and environmental changes resulting in substantial drift of measurement readings.
Proposals have been made to use both a cold atom accelerometer and a conventional accelerometer together. One such proposal recognized the theoretical usefulness of the cold atom accelerometer to provide a precision reference to improve measurements from a conventional accelerometer via a frequency/bandwidth domain weighted filtering scheme.